December 22, 2009

Hulu added site-wide tags to its service, an augmentation of traditional search that makes it much easier to find clips when you don’t know specific title or episode information.It also now added “caption search” to all shows that support closed captioning.

How does this work ?

Just search for a particular word or phrase in the captions tab on a supported show and you’ll get back results that you can immediately access. The captions search results show up with thumbnails, so you can visually select the part of the clip you want to watch.

The benefitsSuppose you remember a line from a show but not the episode title — this is a quick fix.

What else ?Hulu has also implemented a “Heat Map” that shows the portions of an episode that contain the words or phrases you are searching for. You can click on the blue lines in the map to go straight to those sections or more generally visualize your searches’ placement in the clip.